Resources

Table of contents

One of the most helpful resources for me was my statistician/collaborator in psychology. He found my project interesting and worthwhile to discuss. I attribute the success of the project (in terms of gathering meaningful data) to our well thought out plan before the study began. It was also very helpful to be able to contact Bill Cliff with questions and ideas. I work best when I have the opportunity to discuss my ideas with others and I don't have anyone on campus (except for the new collaborator) to talk with about SoTL. Other resources and references? Well, I find the articles in CBE very, very helpful. They are well written and the project designs are well done and I am able to access them easily from my institution. If anyone is interested, I could send a specific list of valuable references for anyone interested in learning more about how to use clickers, how to incorporate them in the classroom, how they affect learning, etc.

I did not find many new resources or references relevant to my project as I was generally doing the Red Queen thing all year (but, I think I did stay in place!) Perhaps the greatest resources I found were the people who are interested and want to be involved in this type of project. I appreciated meeting with a statistician (who first pulled her hair, and then, agreed, that it should be possible), with my colleagues in informal and formal meetings, and with my administrators in discussions about possibilities, both department and campus-wide.

I have benefitted from access to faculty in my department, in other departments, and on other campuses who are abe and willing to lend their expertise in this learning process. Likewise, my mentor and colleagues in the Biology Scholars program have proven the greatestg resource of all. The wealth of literature on the subject of SoTL has proven to be a vast resource which I have only begun to tap. There are other resources at my disposal such as faculty interest groups on such topics as service learning civic engagement which I have also not yet tapped but which I see as a potential future resource. Perhaps my data will become a resource for others as well, so in some way, I consider my students as a resource which I also need to use more effectively through this research project.

The Miami University of Ohio Faculty Learning Community website (http://www.units.muohio.edu/flc/) had a number of tremendous resources about setting up and running FLCs. When my campus Office of Instruction and Assessment said they would fund a pilot FLC centered around issues of curriculum, I found two articles by Michael Bugeja, both in the Chronicle of Higher Education useful: The Elephant in the Room: Curricular Glut (March 28, 2010), and How to Fight the High Cost of Curricular Glut (February 1, 2009).

For my own FLC project on biology curriculum, a very recent paper that describes a “core” set of topics for Introductory Biology for majors has been very helpful (E. Gregory, C. Lending, A. N. Orenstein, and J. P. Ellis, Redesigning Introductory Biology: A Proposal. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, May 2011). I also utilized numerous concept inventories that have been published in various subdisciplines of biology:

Building, Using and Maximizing the Impact of Concept Inventories in the Biological Sciences; Report on an NSF-Sponsored Conference on the Construction of Concept Inventories in the Biological Sciences. K. Garvin-Doxas, M. Klymkowsky, S. Elrod. A Supplement to the Building a Basic Biology Concept Inventory (BCI) Project, awarded by the National Science Foundation: http://bioliteracy.colorado.edu/Readings/CImeetingFinal.pdf .

People are resources, right? I found it very helpful to get feedback early on from the other ASM Scholars and the facilitators.Honestly, I think without the early feedback, this year my have been a “pilot” year for the project.Instead I anticipate being able to submit a couple of papers from this work.I have also found it very helpful to work with a social scientist colleague on the statistical analysis.

Biggest help has been a stats manual. Haven't used anything beyond basic stats for a few years. Had to relearn alot that I never understood as a student in the first place. I've also hooked up with our Science educators and our Faculty Development office. Both have been key in helping me think through issues and providing insights to jump start my research.

I did a great deal of literature searching prior to the start of this project. The research literature around student learning has been the best source of information for my project. I appreciated the help of the biology scholars group and the resources provided have been helpful in narrowing my searching. As always, my colleagues have been a great help, particularly as we develop the newly designed course.

The most valuable resource has been the ideas/comments/feedback offered by the BSP community. Just reading emails/conversations/wiki posts has helped me to revamp my research project and get motivated to start again.

The resource I used the most is the ERIC database. I also received help and guidance from our school's IRB coordinator in designing and executing the consent form. I am also looking into statistical textbooks for some tools to analyze my data.

My colleagues have been a tremendous resource, both in terms of helping me develop my ideas and execute my project. Literature references have been scarce and difficult to mine, but my university's library has a Faculty Development section with many useful books, and I found a few journals (like CBE-Life Sciences Education) to be particularly rich in useful and interesting articles.

The summer workshop has been extremely helpful, as has my time reading and thinking. There is little by way of literature on my specific topic (related stuff, yeah), but no real work done using my approach. Consequently, any work in the area is novel, making external resources a little hard to come by.

This is an area I have failed to explore much, mostly due to lack of time. This past semester I did take a graduate education course in assessment which was indirectly helpful for this project. What I learned may help me better develop appropriate assessment tools for learning in the future.

1. My primary collaborator, David Ammons. He and I worked many long hours together to come up with the assessment instruments. Then he put it all into the software. He is also the database manager. As you can see, without him, all of this would never come about.

2. My other collaborator, Ralph Carlson- for much counseling and advice on how to put together assessment instruments.

3. Our University of Texas- Pan American IT department, especially Janie Palacios and Frank Zecca along with their respective departments for helping us to find a solution to giving so many students simultaneous access to our software.

References

1.Sadler, TD, McKinney L, 2010. Scientific Research for Undergraduate Students: a Review of the Literature. Journal of College Science Teaching 39, 43-49.

1) Pat Hutchings paper on the taxonomy of research projects has been really helpful. I always give it to people who come and ask me about T&L research. Once they read it, they have a better idea of what's possible in the field and how they should be addressing their research project (and forming their research question).

2) Deadlines imposed by the scholars program keep me motivated. Knowing that there are a group of us scholars who are all struggling with the same issues also helps a lot.

3) Being able to tell people that you are an ASM Biology Scholar. Their ears prick up and they want to help you or get involved with what you are doing! Thanks for your great name ASM!

4) My statistician collaborator at UQ - Ian Wood. He's terrific. We see things from different viewpoints and his comments are always insightful.

5) The wide variety of other people I have found opportunities to talk to. All sorts of people become interesting once you have an education bent, rather than a pure science bent. I'm really enjoying learning from all of them.

My biggest resource has been my colleagues, asking questions of them and having them help me think about thenext steps in my project have been instrumental. In addition the Outcomes Assessment group at my institution has been helpful in guiding me to resources such as librarians and statisticians. Finally the primary literature although there is always more I need to read.

Collaboration with a statistician was a huge help. Also, when I did post to the group I found the interactions to be stimulating, uplifting, inspiring and very informative. I failed to search the literature as it still seems daunting. I am embarassed by that as I would have never approached any other studies I have done without consulting the literature more than I have. I need to work on that.

As Kristen mentioned, I really got a lot out of our summer workshop last July and still find little notes to myself about resources and ideas to follow up on. It was quite valuable talking with Julie Reynolds about writing assignments in science courses. I was able to read a bunch of papers this year, but have an even larger collection on my "to read" file. It is inspiring to see the work that is being done on ecological literacy, informal writing, and biological concept inventories, and I hope to contribute to one or more of these areas.

Honestly, the biggest resource for me has been the Scholars workshop and the focus that I got on asking a well-defined question there. I have a couple of colleagues who have also been great to bounce ideas off of. One of them will work with me on continuing my project this fall since we are both teaching the relevant class this fall. I do need to spend more time exploring the relevant primary literature. That's an area that I have fallen short on due to lack of time but hope to remedy this summer and fall.

I still find that reading the education articles in Science and Nature, and browsing ERIC with specific topics, works the best in the limited time I have had available. I am so looking forward to having the luxury of spending extended time focused on reading the biology education literature.

The most obvious resource for my project was the use of the Genetics Literacy Assessment Instrument as developed by Bethany Bowling. I found it interesting to compare my very preliminary data with her 2008 results. Another invaluable resource for me is the <leo_highlight leohighlights_underline="false" leohighlights_url_bottom="http%3A//shortcuts.thebrowserhighlighter.com/leonardo/plugin/highlights/3_2/tbh_highlightsBottom.jsp?keywords%3Dteam%26domain%3Dwiki.biologyscholars.org" leohighlights_url_top="http%3A//shortcuts.thebrowserhighlighter.com/leonardo/plugin/highlights/3_2/tbh_highlightsTop.jsp?keywords%3Dteam%26domain%3Dwiki.biologyscholars.org" leohighlights_keywords="team" onmouseout="leoHighlightsHandleMouseOut('leoHighlights_Underline_5')" onmouseover="leoHighlightsHandleMouseOver('leoHighlights_Underline_5')" onclick="leoHighlightsHandleClick('leoHighlights_Underline_5')" id="leoHighlights_Underline_5" style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer; display: inline; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"> The</leo_highlight> most obvious resource for my project was the use of the Genetics Literacy Assessment Instrument as developed by Bethany Bowling. I found it interesting to compare my very preliminary data with her 2008 results. Another invaluable resource for me is the Team Based Learning Collaborative. I attended their meeting in Las Vegas in March (I know, a tough place to attend a meeting - but all in the name of science!) and was inspired by their enthusiasm and their involvement now in the education research field. All very early, but they had some interesting ways of looking at the data. I am still not even close to publishing, but at least I feel I am on the right track.